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“Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use,” the paper continued. The way to stop this is to “stop treating population growth as a ‘given’ and consider the nutritional, health and social benefits of humanely ending growth well below nine billion and starting a slow decline. This would be a monumental task, considering the momentum of population growth. Monumental, but not impossible if the political will could be generated globally to give full rights, education and opportunities to women, and provide all sexually active human beings with modern contraception and backup abortion.”

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The proceedings were closely watched, as this was the first high-profile case against child sexual abuse that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had brought against a member of the politically powerful Satmar ultra-Orthodox community during his more than two decades in office. This sentence is the longest a Brooklyn court has imposed on a member of the ultra-Orthodox community for sexual abuse of a child. As Mr. Weberman was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he turned to his wife and gave her a nod and a small smile. On Dec. 9, Mr. Weberman was found guilty of 59 counts of sexual abuse, charges that carried a maximum combined sentence of 117 years. He was found guilty of engaging in various sexual acts, including oral sex, groping and acting out pornographic videos, during therapy sessions that were meant to help the girl become more religious. The abuse lasted three years.

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Since the revelations of Jimmy Savile’s prolific sex offending came to light last year there has been a palpable effort on the part of the government and much of the media (most notably the BBC, where Savile worked – and abused children – for decades) to brush the issue under the carpet. The disturbing implications as to how Savile was able to operate unimpeded and his connections to rich and powerful people, have been put aside in favour of focusing media attention on other minor celebrities and has-beens and the occasional dead politician. While there have been hints pointing to paedophile rings linked to members of the government – notably after Tom Watson MP raised the issue in Parliament – few mainstream journalists have conducted a thorough investigation, and the idea of organized networks of child abusers reaching into the upper echelons of society is rarely considered a possibility.

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In a stunning revelation from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), it appears that COINTELPRO is alive and well. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, PCJF was able to obtain documents showing how the FBI was treating the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, from its inception, as a potential criminal and domestic terrorist threat. This despite the FBI’s own acknowledgement that the OWS organizers themselves planned on engaging in peaceful and popular protest and did not “condone the use of violence.”

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A woman allegedly caught stealing hair weave from a West Side Chicago store was almost stripped naked by the owners. There are few details available, but based on the footage, several people tried to detain two black female shoplifters. One alleged female offender, wearing a dark-colored tank top and shorts, put up a violent struggle… knocking an older Asian woman to the floor, pulling her hair, and toppling merchandise. During the melee, the female suspect’s shorts were nearly ripped off her as the shopkeepers struggled to hold her for the police. Another black female allegedly involved in the incident had her shirt torn and her breasts were exposed.

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Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he’s close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he’d need is an “adventurous human woman” — einen abenteuerlustigen weiblichen Menschen — to act as a surrogate mother. It’s not out of the question at all. As MIT Technology Review’s Susan Young points out, scientists cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex in 2009. It died immediately, sure. But they still cloned it. What would that entail? According to a 2008 study of a Neanderthal infant skeleton (from which the above image is taken), “the head of the Neanderthal newborn was somewhat longer than that of a human newborn because of its relatively robust face,” and Neanderthal women generally had a wider birth canal than human women.

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On Thursday, two local women, who we’ll call Samantha and Sarah, expressed concern with the statue and called its presence “disrespectful” to the departed whose final resting places are located in the vicinity of where the porcelain folk figure – or Santa Muerte as it’s more commonly referred to in the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere – was placed. The statue depicts Death atop a crushed pile of skulls, cloaked in black and wielding a bronze globe in its left hand and a scythe in its right. Two incense sticks were found inside the sculpture, one within the globe that was visible through a gaping hole and another inside the base, which appeared to have been broken to gain access. It’s also accompanied by a bronze owl perched near the base and a tag tied to the scythe that displays a crowned Winged Death dangling a heart from a string.

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Have you ever wanted to show a list of the entire download history of a Mac? Maybe you know you downloaded a file but you can’t quite pinpoint where you got it from and the “Get Info” trick didn’t work. Or maybe you are trying to track down a file that has been placed on a system that led to problems. Whether it’s for troubleshooting, personal interest, or forensics, the following command will show you everything that you’ve downloaded to a Mac regardless of the application that it came from

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Brain scans could soon be used to detect whether or not people are racist, scientists say. Researchers found that brain scans were able to pick up on differences in the way that people with implicit negative racial attitudes viewed black and white faces. Racial stereotypes have previously been shown to have subtle and unintended consequences on how we treat members of different race groups.

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On Friday, police found Michele’s corpse with four other bodies dumped outside a kindergarten school. Fighting back tears, Deborah Ngoh Tonye described what was left of her sister’s gruesome corpse. Someone had removed Michele’s genitals, tongue, eyes, hair, and breasts. Michele’s bizarre murder is believed to be part of a wave of killings linked to occult rituals that has triggered panic in Yaounde, the capital city of more than 2 million people in the West African nation of Cameroon. In the past two weeks police have found 18 bodies dumped along the streets. Authorities said all of the bodies had been mutilated. Officials have not said if the female victims among the 18 bodies had been raped.

Check out the band of snow being generated by the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant near Shippingport. Up to an inch of snow has fallen as a result of the steam billowing from the stacks.

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Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say. The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks. Aylin Caliskan Islam (left); Sadia Afroz (right) Aylin Caliskan Islam (left); Sadia Afroz (right) “If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany. “Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you’ll probably use the same function words in chat messages. “Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away.” The analysis techniques could also reveal botnet owners, malware tool authors and provide insight into the size and scope of underground markets, making the research appealing to law enforcement.

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Bas Lansdorp, the 35-year-old founder of Mars One, told FoxNews.com his company is serious about a one-way mission. The company will hold a worldwide lottery next year to select 40 people for a training team. They will then set up a mock colony in the desert, possibly somewhere in the U.S., for three months. This initial team will be reduced to ten crew members. They will then be sent to Mars, never again to return.

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Using the mouth, lips, tongue and voice to generate sounds that one might never expect to come from the human body is the specialty of the artists known as beatboxers. Now scientists have used scanners to peer into a beatboxer as he performed his craft to reveal the secrets of this mysterious art.

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A farmer who was arrested last month expressed his displeasure Thursday afternoon in Newport by driving a heavy tractor over seven police vehicles owned by the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department, authorities said. State police estimated the damage at about $250,000. No one was hurt.

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Marsh then had Carter “exit the patrol unit, placed him into handcuffs, searched him a second time then placed him into the back seat of the patrol unit.” Jonesboro Police Sergeant Lyle Waterworth told WREG that Carter had been “handcuffed behind his back and double locked, and searched.” At that point, Officer Keith Baggett believed a passing car ran over a piece of metal in the road because he heard “a loud thump with a metallic sound.” Baggett said he then heard “several thumps” after Marsh released the two other suspects. Marsh motioned Baggett over to the patrol car and said the 21-year-old had shot himself. When the officers opened the patrol car door, they found Carter in a “sitting position slumped forward with his head in his lap.” The report indicated that Carter was still handcuffed and a small caliber handgun was sitting beside him.

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Iran on Wednesday denied reports that its nuclear program’s systems had been hit with a new cyber virus which shut down computer functions at two facilities – and played music by AC/DC at loud volume. “Who seriously believes such a story? It is baseless and there has never been such a thing,” Chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), Fereydoun Abbasi, told ISNA news agency.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he did not favour a tough punishment in the trial of an all-girl punk band which performed a song against his rule in Moscow’s biggest church. “There is nothing good in what they did,” news agencies quoted Putin as saying about the three Pussy Riot members. “Nevertheless, I do not think that they should be judged too severely for this.” Putin’s first comments on a case that has split Russian opinion and drawn concern from both global music stars and Western states suggests a lenient ruling in the ongoing trial of the three 20-something part-time musicians. The band — its members dressed in tight neon dresses and knitted balaclavas — in February performed a “punk prayer” in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral that included lyrics condemning the Church’s open support for the state.

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Facebook has more than 83 million fake profiles, including millions created for users’ pets and a large number of accounts the company deems “undesirable”, it has admitted. The figure emerged in Facebook’s first quarterly report to US financial regulators since the world’s biggest social network made its much-criticised stock market debut in May. In a return published this week, the company said 8.7% of its 955 million global users are not real.

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Fifty police officers across the UK have been arrested as part of a crackdown on suspected paedophiles who pay to access child pornography websites, detectives revealed today. The officers were among 1,300 people arrested on suspicion of accessing or downloading indecent images of children – some as young as five – from US-based Internet sites.

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THE kids these days play their music too loud and it all sounds the same. Old fogies familiar with such sentiments will be happy to hear that maths bears them out. An analysis published in Scientific Reports by Joan Serrà of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona and his colleagues has found that music has indeed become both more homogeneous and louder over the decades.

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Facebook Abstainers could be labeled Suspicious

As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used myspace instead of facebook (or as they put it, “largely invisible on the web”, haha @ myspace), and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of facebook. So being social on any other website isn’t good enough, it has to be specifically facebook that people are using. While it is already established that sites like facebook and google+ are no good for political activists, abuse survivors, and people in the witness protection program; abuse survivors will have to take a back seat while more and more insane articles like this come out. There seems to be an insanity bubble around older people which has arrived after the initial facebook boom that brought in the youth, where they see facebook as a necessary utility; instead of a trendy website that will have passed in a few years.

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Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road. You may have seen the recent New York Times op-ed that admonished us to start referring to our mobile devices as “trackers” instead of “phones.” Perhaps as ALPR technology spreads we should start saying “tracker” in place of “car,” too. We need statutory protections to limit the collection, retention, and sharing of our travel information. And we need to find out more about this technology.

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Start-up says 80% of its Facebook ad clicks came from bots

A start-up company said it’s leaving Facebook because 80% of its ad clicks are coming from bots. Musician site Limited Run said Facebook also won’t let it change its Pages name unless it commits to buy $2,000 in advertsing on the social network per month. Limited Run said it plans to delete its Facebook page because only 20% of the ad clicks it gets come from Facebook users. The rest come from bots, or web robots, which are software programs that run automated tasks quickly. The company, which goes by its Limited Pressing on Facebook, said it used six analytic services and its own analysis to find out discovered that bots make most of the ad clicks. “Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things,” the company said in a note. “Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site.”

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Eyewitness News learned, tips from the public helped investigators identify the suspect Tuesday night. Then on Wednesday morning, detectives tracked down and arrested the suspect at a deli at the corner of Farragut and Chestnut Streets. Sources say the suspect is a black male who turned 13-years-old just two months ago. We are told he has been arrested twice before for robbery-related offenses. On Tuesday, police told Eyewitness News the gun-toting suspect had victimized five people in less than 24 hours. But that was not the most shocking part of this crime spree. What had everyone talking is how young the suspect looked. “About 12 years old? Quite young. Very young.”

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Her face etched with pain, a child trains for Olympic glory while her gymnastics trainer stands on her legs. The cartoon space rockets and animal astronauts on her tiny red leotard are a stark and powerful reminder of this little girl’s tender age as she trains as hard as any adult athlete in the Western world. Nanning Gymnasium in Nanning, China, is one of many ruthless training camps across the country to which parents send their children to learn how to be champions.

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Brown, 57, lived alone in the Whispering Pines mobile home park in Largo, a professional puppeteer with a soft, Southern-accented voice and thick eyeglasses. He often served pizza to kids in the neighborhood, then drove them to services at Gulf Coast Church, where he was an active congregant. But there was another side to Brown, according to a 29-page criminal complaint filed July 20 in federal court in Tampa: The man who, as he was feeding pizza to teenagers, nursed fantasies of murdering and eating them. The one who acted out Bible stories with puppets at his church, while musing online about carving and cooking the body parts of a young parishioner for Easter. “I imagine him wiggling and then going still,” Brown told an associate in an Internet chat session, describing his plot to kill and cannibalize a boy at Gulf Coast Church, according to the criminal complaint.

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Most people have heard some variation of the saying “never bring a knife to a gunfight.” But the Chinese government seems to have taken that to a heated extreme. This video shows three soldiers using a powerful flamethrower to douse a tree reportedly filled with wasps:

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The woman told police she was standing next to the bar at Shooters Grill and Bar, 1801 13th St., about 11:45 p.m. Saturday when a man — later identified as Timothy Paez, 22 — came up behind her and put his arm around her. The woman turned around and said, “Um, really?,” and Paez took his arm off her, according to the report.. According to police, a few seconds later, the woman said she felt some sort of liquid hitting her leg. She initially thought Paez was spilling his beer on her, but when she turned around she told police she saw Paez with his penis exposed urinating on her leg and the front of the bar. Thanks Jasmine

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Witten and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s and landed in the city’s street art scene are coming of age — middle age, that is.

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On an average, more than a kilogram of heroin was seized every day on the Indo-Pak border adjoining Punjab for the first six months of this year. Records with the Border Security Force (BSF) show that in the first half of 2012, the force has seized a record 197 kilograms of heroin worth nearly Rs 1,000 crore. This is nearly three times more than 68 kgs seized last year. It is also the highest amount of the drug seized in the past five years.

Warner Bros have confirmed that they are working on a prequel to the Jack Nicholson thriller – which contained the famous line, “Heeere’s Johnny.”

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Cheese is the slang name for a mixture of black tar heroin and Tylenol PM. The substances are combined and come out looking much like parmesan cheese. The resulting product is sold for as little as $2 per hit. Kids in the Dallas-area are buying “cheese” with their lunch money, according to media reports. They’re snorting the stuff up their noses – often at school – and dying in alarming numbers, according to the Dallas County medical office. A recent study by the Dallas Independent School district determined that more than 5,000 kids have tried cheese. More than two dozen have died of overdoses. Most, like Mariela, first take the drug in middle school. That’s shocking. Middle school students are being targeted by drug dealers and turned into heroin addicts before they reach high school.

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One day this spring, on the condition that I not reveal any details of its location nor the stringent security measures in place to protect its contents, I entered a hidden vault at the Israel Museum and gazed upon the Aleppo Codex — the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it arrived here, in Jerusalem, is a tale of ancient fears and modern prejudices, one that touches on one of the rawest nerves in Israeli society: the clash of cultures between Jews from Arab countries and the European Jews, or Ashkenazim, who controlled the country during its formative years. And the story of how some 200 pages of the codex went missing — and to this day remain the object of searches carried out around the globe by biblical scholars, private investigators, shadowy businessmen and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency — is one of the great mysteries in Jewish history.

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As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back. Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties. Businesses foresee a day when signs and billboards with face-recognition technology can instantly scan your face and track what other ads you’ve seen recently, adjust their message to your tastes and buying history and even track your birthday or recent home purchase. The FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies already are exploring facial-recognition tools to track suspects, quickly single out dangerous people in a crowd or match a grainy security-camera image against a vast database to look for matches.

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Mitt Romney offended Palestinians again today, saying that Israel was more prosperous than Palestine because of its superior culture and the will of God. “You notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israel and Palestine, Romney said at a fundraiser in Jerusalem today, citing each nation’s per-capita GDP, the AP reports. He went on to say that in considering Israel’s accomplishments “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things” including the “hand of providence.”

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The essence of the infor­ma­tion war is the timely inter­jec­tion, dis­tor­tion or omis­sion of news events. Reports can min­i­mize, omit or basi­cally bury key news sto­ries that require analy­sis while mag­ni­fy­ing oth­ers which are of lesser impor­tance to the keen, ana­lyt­i­cal mind. While the Bat­man mas­sacre is tragic, the buzz in the so called alter­na­tive media cir­cle is cen­tered around the litany of ongo­ing sto­ries that will be sti­fled in the week to come by the main­stream media’s focus on the Aurora, CO shoot­ing. Beyond that, the analy­sis you read here is not all pre­sented as 100% fact, some con­clu­sions are pre­sented in light of other evi­dence, and where noted, some are spec­u­la­tive based on edu­cated the­ory. In this era of total media bom­bard­ment, to the point of over­load, some events have to be con­sid­ered beyond just what is con­firmed in print or on video and must be eval­u­ated in the full con­text of pos­si­ble human behav­ior.

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The Justice Department is suing a telecommunications company for challenging a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for customer information — despite the fact that the law authorizing the request explicitly permits such challenges. According to documents provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the telecom, the company (whose name is one of the many redacted details in the documents) received a national security letter (NSL) in 2011. An NSL is essentially a self-issued search warrant whereby the FBI bypasses the Fourth Amendment and demands information about an individual without bothering to obtain a judge’s consent — and forces the recipient of the letter to keep mum about it because disclosure would allegedly harm national security. NSLs were employed somewhat sparingly prior to 2001 but became widely used — and abused, as the Justice Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 — after the misnamed Patriot Act loosened the require

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Though increasingly looked down upon here in the U.S. as a sign of slothfulness and low socioeconomic status, routine fast food consumption in some parts of the world is actually considered to be culturally desirable. But as foreigners progressively adopt the American fast-food lifestyle in place of their own native foods, rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing, including in East and Southeast Asia where diabetes and heart disease rates are off the charts. According to a recent study published in the journal Circulation, globalization continues to usher U.S.-style fast food into East Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia, where natives, especially those from the younger generations, are quickly adopting things like hamburgers and fries in place of their traditional fare. And based on the data, this Western fast food craze is responsible for a significant uptick in cases of diabetes and heart disease.

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Neurologists working with monkeys at Washington University in St. Louis to decode brain activity have stumbled upon a rather surprising result. While working to demonstrate that multiple parameters can be seen in the firing rate of a single neuron (and that certain parameters are embedded in neurons only if they are needed to solve the immediate task), they also found that they could read their monkeys’ minds. This isn’t exactly ESP, but it is really interesting. The researchers came to find out that by analyzing the activity of large populations of neurons, they could discover what actions the monkeys were planning before they made a single motor movement. By monitoring neural activity, the researchers could essentially see what the monkey was thinking about doing next.

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In a recent interview, Chihuahua state spokesman Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international “security” outfits “don’t fight drug traffickers.” Instead, Villanueva argued, they try to control and manage the illegal drug market for their own benefit. “It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Villanueva told the Qatar-based media outlet last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.” Another Mexican official, apparently a mid-level officer with Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security,” echoed those remarks, saying he knew that the allegations against the CIA were correct based on talks with American agents in Mexico. “It’s true, they want to control it,” the official told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.

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What those trying to aggressively market an ever more “exotic sex life” fail to realize is that sexual preferences aren’t shaped by artifice. Buying a leather slapper won’t suddenly give you a penchant for spanking—and let’s face it, if you were really into the idea in the first place, you probably would have gone DIY and just picked up a hairbrush long before now. Making people feel shitty about their vanilla-ness is mainly a capitalist calculation. As any marketing exec knows, the moment people become satisfied is the moment they stop buying stuff.

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A research team from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and West Virginia University have troubling findings for those who think iris scanning is one of the safest methods of biometric security. Their reverse-engineered, “replicated eye” image was able to bypass iris scanning, fooled into thinking the synthetic image was real and correct. Javier Galbally and his team printed out synthetic images of irises taken from codes of real irises stored in security databases to test iris-scanning vulnerabilities. An iris code is the data stored by recognition systems when they scan a person’s eye. This is information that the researchers could replicate in their synthetic images. A commercial iris system only looks for the iris code and not an actual eye, Galbally noted. He and his team tested their fake irises against a leading commercial-recognition system. In 80 percent of attempts, the scanner believed that the attempt was a real eye.

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Shooter James Holmes even went as far as to take Vicodin, a drug found in Heath Ledger at the time of his death. Vicodin is a powerful pain-killer with morphine-like effects that is used in mind control to “dull out” victims. Is there some kind of ritualistic connection between The Dark Knight, the sacrificial death of Heath Ledger and this new installment of a Batman movie that was “launched” with a mass murder? Is there a reason why this mass-murder, which occurred during the midnight screening of a movie called Dark Knight RISING took place in a city called Aurora, the name Roman goddess of dawn (dawn being the time where the sun begins to rise)? Another interesting fact: Aurora is considered to be the mother of the morning star, also know as the Light Bringer, or Lucifer.

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Social scientists hungry for Facebook’s data may be about to get a taste of it. Nature has learned that the social-networking website is considering giving researchers limited access to the petabytes of data that it has amassed on the preferences and behaviour of its almost one billion users. Outsiders will not get a free run of the data, but the move could quell criticism from social scientists who have complained that the company’s own research on its users cannot be verified. Facebook’s in-house scientists have been involved in publishing more than 30 papers since 2009, covering topics from what drives the spread of information and ideas to the relationship between social-networking activity and loneliness. However, because the company fears breaching its users’ privacy, it does not release the underlying raw data.

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Two of the most common causes of blindness are retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease, and macular degeneration, an age-related disorder. Both are characterized by damage to the rod and cone cells in the retina, which robs the eye of its photoreceptors. Treatments for these forms of blindness focuses on restoring the retina’s abilities, and we’ve seen a few examples — stem cell injections, implantations of light-sensitive compounds using viruses, and a whole host of electronic devices and artificial retinas. A chemical called AAQ can also make these damaged cells sensitive to light again, and it wouldn’t require any foreign substances or stem cells.

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The cloud backup guys over at Backupify put together a calculator to help folks estimate the value of their cloud-based Google Gmail web mail accounts. So what’s the average account’s worth? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post. That’s the value of the time invested in the average Gmail account, given how many emails the average Gmail user has written (5,768), how long it takes to write the average email (one minute, 43 seconds), and the most recent U.S. Depart of Labor statistics on average annual salary ($45,230). In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.

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They are a lowly, sturdy food designed for desperate cravings and vending machine convenience. They can endure weeks of neglect and even a mild mashing in a coat pocket or backpack. They are, it should come as no surprise, especially beloved by a similarly hardy but disrespected population: Florida’s prison inmates. Inmates in the Florida prison system buy 270,000 honey buns a month. Across the state, they sell more than tobacco, envelopes and cans of Coke. And they’re just as popular among Tampa Bay’s county jails. In Pasco’s Land O’Lakes Detention Center, they’re outsold only by freeze-dried coffee and ramen noodles. Not only that, these honey buns — so puffy! — have taken on lives of their own among the criminal class: as currency for trades, as bribes for favors, as relievers for stress and substitutes for addiction. They’ve become birthday cakes, hooch wines, last meals — even ingredients in a massive tax fraud. Thanks Jasmine

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Rhonda Roshell Washington, 33, told police her husband was high on PCP when they got into an argument about his drug use at their home in Bryan early Thursday, the Bryan-College Station paper reports. The fight turned physical, she said, and she jabbed him in the hand with her keys. Her husband, however, claimed she became upset about something on his Facebook page and chased him with a knife, stabbing him in the hand.

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This isn’t a story about a skateboarding giant, the UK’s largest skateboard has been created to mark the fact two thirds of children think the Olympics will only be worth watching when more extreme sports like skateboarding are included, obviously. Measuring a staggering seven metres in length, two and half metres in width and at a metre high, the oversized board weighs as much as a baby African elephant – so any ‘ollies’ or ‘kick flips’ are probably out of the question.

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Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

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Despite repeated assurances in public and to the Information Commissioner, Google has admitted that it did not in fact delete all the data, which could include passwords and emails, collected over open WiFi networks by its Streetview mapping cars in 2010 in a number of countries around the world. The news means that Britain’s recently reopened investigation into the so-called WiFi snooping could be bolstered by an opportunity to re-examine evidence that the ICO had asked to be destroyed. The ICO has demanded to examine the data “immediately” to look for evidence that it is in fact more extensive than Google had originally claimed, as authorities in America had discovered for data collected there.

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But he also said that, months later, when it came time to set bailout terms for the Too Big To Fail Set, the government just had no other choice but to use Libor. Sure, that’s one way to look at it. Another, less charitable way to look at it is that the Fed was fully aware that Libor was being manipulated lower, and was fine charging an artificially low rate to lend money to banks and to AIG, in what amounted to yet another kind of bailout. Why make life harder for them, right? They had enough problems dealing with the crisis they had created. Raising red flags about Libor might have only made the crisis worse, making it harder for banks to borrow money. But in the process, the government left untold mountains of cash on the table for U.S. taxpayers. Even if Libor was only manipulated a tiny bit lower, these small breaks add up.

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America treats sex, not violence, as the biggest threat to families and the nation, starting with Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings bestowing action flicks that brutalize half-naked nymphets a PG-13, but anything suggesting female pleasure the deathly NC-17, as happened with the marital cunnilingus scene between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. A common argument against gay marriage or condom commercials is, “What would I say to my kids,” as if sex talk destroys childhood innocence.

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The control freaks are winning, and they are absolutely killing America. Our founding fathers intended to establish a nation where Americans would be free to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in an environment where freedom was maximized and government interference was minimized. Unfortunately, our nation has turned away from those principles and is now running 180 degrees in the other direction. For some reason, our political system tends to attract psychotic control freaks that want to micromanage our lives and make most of our decisions for us. These control freaks are actually convinced that freedom and liberty are “dangerous” and that there should be a rule or a regulation for just about everything. This is not just happening on the federal level either. The truth is that the control freaks are often the worst on the local level. When you add up the red tape on all levels of government, we literally have millions of laws, rules and regulations in America

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An email to F-Secure — allegedly sent from an AEOI scientist — detailed the attack, noting that the malware has shut down some of the facility’s automated processes. The rather vague wording of the email leaves a few unanswered questions as to just what parts of the AEOI are in danger, but one piece of information was very clear: The insidious software prompted several of the group’s computers to begin playing the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC in the middle of the night, and at full volume.

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A revolutionary discovery is rewriting the history of underwear: Some 600 years ago, women wore bras. The University of Innsbruck said Wednesday that archeologists found four linen bras dating from the Middle Ages in an Austrian castle. Fashion experts describe the find as surprising because the bra had commonly been thought to be only little more than 100 years old as women abandoned the tight corset.

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On Wednesday, Baumgartner took another stratospheric leap, this time from an altitude of more than 18 miles — an estimated 96,640 feet, nearly three times higher than cruising jetliners. He landed safely near Roswell, N.M. His top speed was an estimated 536 mph, said Brian Utley, an official observer on site. It’s the second test jump for Baumgartner from such extreme heights and a personal best. He’s aiming for a record-breaking jump from 125,000 feet, or 23 miles, in another month. He hopes to go supersonic then, breaking the speed of sound with just his body.

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What started out as a joke 35 years ago ended with a Massachusetts man paying off his mortgage using 62,000 pennies. “I’ve never saved anything other than pennies. And it started out as a whim. You know, a penny for the mortgage,” Thomas Daigle told NBC affiliate WHDH-TV of Boston. Daigle, from Milford, Mass., recalled how, after signing the mortgage papers 35 years ago, he found a penny on the ground. He and his wife then joked about collecting pennies to pay off the loan — and the rest is history. Over the next 35 years, Daigle would roll pennies, 50 cents at a time. His bank found out the hard way just how much work that was — it reportedly took tellers two days to unroll the penny cases.

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Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown. But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters – one color on one side, another on the other – have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

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A report by a group of civil and human rights attorneys released Wednesday morning paints the clearest picture yet of the New York City police department’s aggressive tactics and over-policing, all of which resulted in the systemic suppression of the basic rights of Occupy protesters. The report, which chronicles events from late September 2011 up to July of 2012, extensively documents numerous ways in which the NYPD acted with excessive force, attempted to intimidate and harass members of the press, expelled activists from public space due to the content of their speech, and ultimately concludes that authorities broke international law in their handling of Occupy Wall Street.

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In 2008, ten times more civilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps. In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year–22 percent of those people were unarmed. As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.”

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Like virtually all massacre shooters before him, the notorious Batman shooter James Holmes is now reported to have been taking hardcore pharmaceutical drugs. In Holmes’ case, they happen to be the very same drugs that ultimately led to the early death of actor Heath Ledger. With a fix for ‘altering his state of mind’, the ‘Batman shooter’ was heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. Holmes even reportedly dosed up on a pharmaceutical cocktail just before the shooting. Side effects of Vicodin use, even at ‘recommended’ levels which Holmes likely far exceeded, include ‘altered mental states’ and ‘unusual thoughts or behavior’.

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The New York Police Department will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft. Kelly says the program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases. He says it will be officially unveiled by New York’s mayor as soon as next week.

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According to the Student Press Law Center, which investigated the girls’ arrest, officials in Hood County, Texas, are refusing to say whether the girls (who were arrested July 16) are still being detained. The center’s reporting suggests that the girls have been behind bars for more than a week for the crime of pranking a fellow student on Facebook